Are we really who we say we are, Lindsay?
At first blush, it felt like a strange question coming from a 20+ year old company.
Building the company from scratch, the founder launched his brand into the world during a time where building businesses felt easier. The markets weren’t saturated with brands and content. People still expected handshakes and in-person meetings, and when you said you were x, y, z, people believed it until you gave them reason to believe otherwise.
And this company? They never gave anyone a reason to believe otherwise. Ever.
Founded in the early 2000s, this company was different from the start. The founder built a company with his convictions and his values front and center – bold and without apology. Every client, every hire, every service was weighed and measured through those convictions. For more than two decades, he lived in action what most companies just talk about in words – and before he positioned his brand for its next era of growth, he wanted someone to peek beyond the substance of what he’d built to tell him if everything he thought was true (about himself, about his team, about his audience, about his industry, about his company) actually was true.
The company had large marketing agencies in their network, and they had the budget to hire a team of the smartest minds. But they reached out to me because they weren’t looking for what those providers were selling. They didn’t just want to optimize their marketing or scale their performance. They wanted the type of growth and clarity that only comes out of Strategic Discernment – next-step moves structured entirely around who they were, who they are, and who they wanted to remain.
Did they get it? Yes – but explaining the how and why starts with unraveling what Strategic Discernment even means.
WHAT IS STRATEGIC DISCERNMENT?
Strategic Discernment is the work of finding out what’s true about your company – before you decide what move to make next. It lives in that place where the gut and the mind meet together to identify the best path forward, and then, it says, “Let’s go even deeper.”More than just an on-the-surface look at the founder, the team, and the clients served, Strategic Discernment leans in and listens for the places where everything looks and sounds like it should, and then – it discovers where appearances and good intentions don’t match up with what’s actually real.
When you compare this against most growth work, you see instantly that the approach offered by Strategic Discernment is different – because it doesn’t ask you to assume the truth or build a strategy with speed. Instead, it slows you down, it makes you intentional, and it establishes true, authentic differentiation rooted in what’s real versus what you think you need.
When you say YES to the invitation offered through Strategic Discernment, you discover a resoundingly honest and values-aligned pathway to running your business and building your brand – not because your ears have been filled to the brim with feel-good ideas, but because it excavates what you didn’t even know was there and gives language to the truth you’ve been living all along.
THE BIGGEST ROADBLOCKS TO STRATEGIC DISCERNMENT: AI AND PERFORMANCE-FIRST CULTURE
A few months ago, I unsubscribed from a community that should have been right up my alley. For months, however, the content pushed out by the leader was consistently (and completely) AI generated – and for me, that sent a clear signal: The leader didn’t have a deep well of wisdom to draw from. Instead, they were drinking from the well of AI’s borrowed knowledge – and placing all their bets that my own well would be shallow enough for me to never stop and notice.
But I did notice, and that noticing turned me away.
Why such low tolerance for AI content, you ask? I give short glimpses into why here and here, but I love the way culture strategist Jasmine Bina sums it up in her article Not the AI Era. The Contract Era: “The reason someone’s incensed that your entire blog post is written in AI-first person is because there was a contract – they give you their attention, you give them the interiority of your mind. Even if AI helps you do that better for your audience, it’s not what the reader agreed to. We’re losing our ability to intuitively trust what we’re receiving. We don’t believe the feedback was legit, the blog post was honest, or that the apology was real because AI separates the symbol of care from the labor of care.”
[My side note: In long-form writing, of course, use AI to help you write better. That looks like a strong editing partner. Never use it to do the thinking or the primary writing for you.]
Since the start of the 21st century, marketers and brands have been mastering ways to manipulate this contract of trust in new, hyper-scaled ways. Because the digital landscape was sold to us with terms like relationship and community, many of us were easily tricked into believing that brand was still about audience. Most often, however, it was about building the right persona and optimizing the right algorithm to increase influence, scale, and performance.
Enamored by the tools (and the promises) of the digital world, we willingly shifted our expectations around human behavior and connection. Values and convictions became emotional props. Community turned into discussion threads. Conflict turned into delete. Now able to completely manufacture and control the order of our social worlds, we used our extra time to focus on metrics and numbers, calling it optimization, personalization, targeted. Success got measured in podcast appearances, subscriber counts, and hours (not spent) in the office.
And all this felt really, really good. Until it stopped working.
A TIMELINE ON HOW EVERYTHING THAT ONCE WORKED BROKE
When you look at the long arc of human history, our modern civilization (and all its conveniences) are a mere blip on civilization’s timeline. And for most of this blip, we’ve kept busy just trying to survive.
When the Industrial Revolution showed up, this fight for survival started to change. Fast.
Large parts of the world found enough stability that they no longer had to worry as much about food and shelter, and by the mid-20th century, we had industrialized our way right out of Maslow’s lower-level needs. Belonging became our new pursuit (hello, social media), and by the late 2010s, we were all talking about self-actualization. Everything – from wellness gurus to family coaches to our bosses down the hall – seemed to be preaching the same message: Want to live the good life? Then you’ve got to optimize, optimize, optimize.
It was a message that worked. Splendidly. Until it didn’t.
For many of us, COVID dismantled our self-made worlds. Almost overnight.
And then, before we could fully make sense of everything we’d lost, AI busted onto the mainstream scene – as if to make it crystal clear that many of the promises around optimization and self-actualization had been built on shifting sand.
Today, those of us left standing are a bit wobbly on our feet. Experts say we’re in a trust recession where everyone’s wondering what’s real and what’s trustworthy, and those still clinging to the old order of business sound a bit tone deaf. Some argue that influencer culture has died, and while some segments of culture continue to optimize for their own personal development – large swaths are back to focusing on those lower order needs of survival, safety, and belonging.
Left grappling with this reality, it’s here where I think we meet our profound choice: We can either replay history and use all the tools at our disposal to hack our way back into self-actualization. Or, we can choose Strategic Discernment and build a strong foundation on substance and truth – so when the next unexpected wave crashes into us, we don’t lose footing on who we really are.
The old English phrase for this either/or conundrum is called a Hobson’s Choice. In the 1600s, a stable keeper told customers they could take the horse closest to the door or none at all. Seeing all the horses in the stable, the customers had the illusion of choice, even though the stable owner only ever presented them with one. We’re facing this same illusion of choice today – because as we move into the next era, the brands, the businesses, and the humans who want to survive won’t do so by chanting the phrase “optimize, optimize, optimize.” Instead, they’ll be the ones doing the harder work of discernment, looking beyond the surface to understand what’s true – of themselves and of others.
WHAT DOES STRATEGIC DISCERNMENT LOOK LIKE?
Recently, I attended a webinar that (like loads of webinars before it) proved to be a waste of my time.
It promised to teach how to start showing up in AEO, and I expected proven tips on how to become a referenced brand in AI search. But that didn’t happen. The hosts knew essentially as much as I did – and anything they shared could have been found via a quick conversation with my own AI tool.
It was disappointing and frustrating, but it was also confirming: We’re at the edge of an old world with old rules and we’re emerging into something new – where the rules haven’t been written yet.
No one is a true expert in AI or AEO (at least from a business/brand-building POV) because they can’t be. We’ve not been in the game long enough to see what actually works. But few want to say that part out loud because “I don’t know yet” isn’t a truth that helps you build a quick business or prey on desperate customers.
This is the difference between Strategic Discernment and optimized, efficiency-first obsession.
Strategic Discernment isn’t afraid to admit what it doesn’t yet know. It’s curious. It’s patient. It listens – for resonance and truth. And it knows that when it does the hard, slower work of frontloading all decisions with what’s real, performance and growth will inevitably follow.
My client asked for and invested in Strategic Discernment, not because they weren’t interested in scale or success. In fact, they very much wanted to grow, and they were very aware that they needed to market themselves better. They just didn’t want to do any of that if it meant they had to detach themselves from the mission, values, and culture that built them in the first place.
Has the work paid off? It’s too soon to tell you it’s paid off in spades, and I’d be breaking my own rule if I pretended otherwise. What I do know is this: They’re living it out in real time and putting it to work – using it in sales conversations, using it to filter potential buyers, and leveraging it as they grow their thought leadership. For them, “We finally know how to talk about who we are,” means they aren’t sounding like every other competitor. It means they aren’t floundering in networking and sales conversations. And it means they’ve got solid ground to stand on as they look ahead for what’s next.
It all reminds me of something I used to do as a kid.
Every summer, my cousin and I would spend hours at the pool trying to figure out how to walk on water.
We knew it was technically possible (if we could move our feet fast enough). So with a running start, we’d sprint as fast as we could across the surface, convinced that maybe we could outrun the laws beneath our feet.
For a few brief seconds, we felt like tiny, infallible gods as we outwitted reality and momentum carried us farther than it should have.
Eventually, we sank.
Looking back, I think much of the digital age has functioned the same way.
We moved so quickly — scaling faster, producing faster, optimizing faster, performing faster — that we allowed ourselves to think the speed itself could change our very rules of existence. We got confused in this process, thinking that visibility meant trust, persona meant substance, and performance meant truth.
We believed it all, too, until reality busted through our front doors and reasserted itself.
And I think this is why Strategic Discernment matters now more than ever. Not because it helps business owners outpace reality, but because it’s the only thing that will keep us tethered to ourselves and others while the rest of the world tries to outrun the water.
